The Phenomena of Modernism and Postmodernism - Literature review Example

?Critical Literature Review. The phenomena of “modernism” and “postmodernism” have been defined in many ways but one of the clearest is that of Sarupand Raja who simply state that the period is one of “enormous and astonishing social change” which “is bound up with the emergence of new ways in which we experience space and time.” (Sarup and Raja: 1996, p. 94) At the start of his book on the self and modernity Giddens uses the analogy of divorce to explain the extra pressures that modernity brings to people. Although traditional society was always subject to unforeseen events and even catastrophes, interpersonal relationships in previous times tended to require more stable and fixed modes of behaviour. The way to behave was more readily mapped, and people knew what to do in the various phases of their lives from childhood through teenage years, work, marriage, parenthood, retirement and preparing for death of loved ones and of one’s own self. The modern industrialised, capitalist world, he argues, is fluid and contains many more uncharted areas and this requires that our self-identity should form a trajectory, requiring that we make day to day adjustments depending on what happens in our lives. (Giddens: 1991, p. 14). Incessant streams of new information result in a process of what Giddens calls “chronic revision” (Giddens: 1991, p. 20) and the complexity of modern capitalist society requires people to place their trust in increasingly opaque systems and organisations, many of which are subject to quite spectacular failures and radical transformations. Crossley partly agrees with this analysis and adds the observation that modern societies consist of overlapping networks, and that embodiment is reflexive, and imposed upon individials from many souces (Crossley: 2006, p. 112) Giddens describes the way that all human beings put on “performances” of their self in different social situations. People continually evaluate themselves, and are evaluated by others: “The body, in other words, in late modernity becomes increasingly socialised and drawn into the reflexive organisation of social life.” Giddens 1991, p. 98. As people interact with the world they try to impose control on their own bodies: “Bodily discipline is intrinsic to the competent social agent; it is transcultural rather than specifically connected with modernity.” Giddens, 1991, p. 57. Bourdieu’s influential work on human judgement and taste proposes that all human culture is structured in a hierarchical way and that people access this culture through the family that they are born in and then via all the opportunities that they meet in later life (Bourdieu: 1984, pp. 1-5) This theory implies a structuralist view whereby social patterns tend to repeat themselves again and again through the generations. Bourdieu uses the concept of habitus, which is the partly unconscious way in which people deal with the society around them. (Bourdieu: 1984, pp. 169-174) He argues that people learn how to see the world, and consume all it has to offer, in their early childhood, and that they are conditioned by their family background to approach things in certain habitual ways: “The manner in which culture is acquired lives on in the manner of using it.”(Bourdieu: 1984, p. 1) The foods people eat, the clothes that they wear, the music and films they like, the values they place on educational achievement and all the other products of the modern world are therefore embodied in each person in stratified ways, and this explains the differences between social classes and the tendency for people to remain within their original social class. When this insight is applied to inborn qualities like race and gender it also helps to explain why people from ethnic minorities, women and people from lower social classes still suffer exclusion and unequal access to promotions in work even when educational barriers have been removed. Bourdieu’s point is that how people learn things is just as important, as what they learn because this influences the way they relate to the world in general. People pick up these embodied differences which are encoded in everything that a person is and does and they treat each other according to this hidden code rather than on such superficial acquisition such as wealth or education. Some modern forms of embodiment such as extreme sport, and some medical conditions like anorexia, can be seen as an internalisation of discipline, resting on Foucault’s work: “The expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations” (Foucault: 1995, p. 16) Feminist interpretations of Foucault appreciate the understanding of power relations that he brings, and the tendency of modern societies to try and “normalize” people, in a hierarchical way which priviliges the male, the healthy and the powerful (Birken: 1999, p. 109) McLaren,connects Foucault’s analogies with the possibility of formulating alternative models in the struggle for gender equality: “His conception of the body allows us to think of the body as both normalized and resistant.” (McLaren: 2002, p. 85) Bauman reflects on the dependency that embodiment forces upon human beings and especially on ways that people try to overcome their dependency by gaining mastery over their own body. (Bauman: 1992, pp. 62-64) Ultimately the battle is lost, however, since humans are mortal and the body, along with the society in which the body struggles for survival, are doomed to die. Bermudez et al (1995) present a collection of essays on different ways of appreciating the self, whether as a single entity or something far more complex than this encompassing physical and mental aspects. A goood illustration of a single person’s projection of self following Giddens’ analysis is Samel Fussell’s account of his transformation from a skinny, bookish intellectual into a tough bodybuilder. University and the body-building studio are at opposite ends of Bourdieu’s cultural hierarchy and Fussell learns through experience that changing his physical shape, and learning all the behaviours that belong with massive muscle-building does not change who he is as a person and it does not convince the working class people with whom he increasingly has contact. He is aware that he is fearful and over-critical and that he does not easily fit into an urban working class environment: “Something about me seemed to appeal to every deadbeat, coon artist, and self-proclaimed philosopher of the city. No matter where I turned, confidence tricksters hounded my path.” (Fussell: 1991, p. 21) This shows that the urban working class people around him can detect the higher class that he embodies. Fussell sets out on a deliberate mission to dismantle and discard the self that he had been as a teenager: “To become something else seemed the only alternative.” (Fussell: 1991, p. 138) After a long and gruelling period training as a body builder and taking part in competitions Fussell succeeded in dramatically changing one aspect of himself – his physical appearance, but he utterly failed to discard and replace his true inner self: “I was actually an impossible idealist, who turned to bodybuilding as a way of purifying myself.” (Fussell: 1991, p. 249) The bodybuilder persona was in the end a caricature of himself, “an inflated cartoon” (Fussell: 1991, p.249) which in the end Fussell rejected in favour of a body image that was closer to his true habitus. This story is an interesting demonstration of the power of the embodied self that people inherit and the amount of conscious effort that it takes to change even some of its attributes. Ultimately, however, Fussell learns in this process to accept who he is, imperfections and all. Giddens’ model only takes us so far in in understanding embodiment in the modern world. Wacquant’s study of the boxing milieu takes up some of the same ideas that Fussell mentions but from the perspective of a sociologist looking to understand the people and the environment for its own sake. An interesting dimension in Wacquant’s approach is that it presents the lower class boxing gym as something positive: “a protective shield against the temptations and dangers of the street” (Wacquant: 2004, p. 37) He shows how Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital and its embodiment in individuals is lived out in the boxing world. There is a clear trajectory in a boxer’s life, from training, through amateur and professional tournaments and into a phase when the boxer’s bodily capital loses value. Older boxers can make use of techniques to extend their ability to draw benefit from their bodies despite the inevitability of the ageing process. Far from being a brutal and crude activity, boxing is a subtle and requires its adherents to make use of sophisticated judgements in a precarious world where one is constantly measuring one’s own bodily capital against that of others: “The pugilist navigates “by eye” between two equally dangerous reefs - all the more dangerous because they are invisible, mobile over time, and to a great extent subjective.” (Wacquant: 2004, p. 130) A fighter must always know how much to train, how hard to hit, which tactics to use in order to minimize his own weakness and exploit the weaknesses of his opponent and this operates both on a physical and a psychological level. Wacquant’s boxing gym serves as a striking metaphor for life in the shifting post-modern world, and in the process argues against glib assumptions about lower class and immigrant populations. The boxers he describes are self-motivated, highly disciplined and striving for a form of integration that brings them recognition and respect. Wacquant points out that boxing is one of the most immediate and “pure” examples of embodiment: “For the rules of the pugilistic art boil down to bodily moves that can be fully apprehended only in action and place it at the very edge of that which can be intellectually grasped and communicated.” (Wacquant: 2004, p. 59) As a participant observer Wacquant discovers this through a combination of observation and actually going through training and amateur competition. By leaving his academic credentials at the door and participating in this training of the subconscious self he gains understanding that is not mental, but physical, and not conscious but instinctive. It seems then, from this study, that Bourdieu’s approach is a better one than Giddens’ approach because it illuminates both lower and upper class environments. There are merits in both of these studies which focus on the field of boxing but they illuminate different aspects of postmodern living and slightly different philosophical appreciations of the relationship between the human mind and the human body. Both studies aim to take into account the social context which the two novice boxers enter but neither is a fully postmodern analysis of these environments. Aspects of gender and to some extent also race are glossed over, even though they are highly relevant areas for the extreme sport arena. The Giddens revisionist hypothesis explains many of the processes which a person unconsciously and subconsciously undergoes, and is has useful applications in the field of education. Bourdieu’s appreciation of the way that culture subtly influences how the world is understood and how human actions are secretly coded and decoded is, however, the better model for understanding these aspects because it includes a wider grasp of collective understandings which evolve when people form into groups and societies. References Bauman, Z. et al (eds) (1992) Mortality and Immortality and other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity Press.  Bermudez, J. (1995) The Body and the Self. MIT Press: Massachusetts.  Birke, L. (1999) Feminism and the Biological Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.  Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated from the French by R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1988) State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2001). Masculine Domination. Cambridge: Polity Press. Burkitt, I. (1999) Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity and Modernity. London: Sage.  Crossley, N. (2006) Reflexive Embodiment in Contemporary Society. Maidenhead: OUP. Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Person. New York: Second Vintage Books, 1995. Fussell. S.W. (1991) Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. New York: Avon Books. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity. Grenfell, M. (2008) Pierre Bourdieu: Key Concepts. London: Acumen Press. McLaren, M. A. (2002) Feminism, Foucault and Embodied Subjectivity. Albany: State University of New York. Sarup, M. and Raja, T. Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Wacquant, L. (2004) Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. 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